LOCKPORT — A Harvey Street woman claimed on Wednesday that she heard the voice of the Virgin Mary and has seen visions of the Mother of God in the trimmed branches of a maple tree in front of her house.

Antonia “Toni” Filipertis, 84, a devout Catholic, comes to tears when she relates the story which began about 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Her family firmly believes her.

Neighborhood children and adults see and wonder. Several teachers from John Pound Elementary School came across the street to take a look. Principal Roberta Donovan could not swear to the apparition but said, “I could see a figure on one and on the other one I could see a cross.”

What is the figure? Filipertis, a native of Poland who met her husband at the Lady of Czestochowa Shrine, is sure it is the Virgin Mary.

Take a look at the picture below the fold and see if you see it, as I sure don’t:

To me it looks like the face of a dog with dark fur and a white nose, but then I always did like dogs.

This may sound weird, but like looking at a drawing of the edges of a cube on the chalkboard and letting one eye become dominant and then the next, I can see several different things in this picture.

The first thing I saw within the knot was more like a portrait of some old colonial man, with his hands crossed over his big stomach and the cuffs of his blouse sticking way out from the sleeves of his coat — The picture cuts his head off just under his nose, and you can catch some of his white wig and left cheek on the top right.

I can also see a dog, or even a guinea pig, with its head cocked to it’s right.

People are conditioned to look to see faces in things – hence the “Face” on Mars. I look a this and if I look at it at just the right angle (the one that makes my neck hurt a bit) and squint a bit and use more imagination than most TV writers, I sort of see a silhouette of Michalangelo’s Pieta. But that’s stretching it.

Joshua: nope, psychotic delusions don’t get shared between multiple people. Rather, what you’re seeing is normal brain function leading someone astray. Our brains are basically pattern-matching engines that behave as if they were optimized for sensitivity at the expense of specificity; i.e. they’d rather find a pattern where one really doesn’t exist than miss one that really does. In this case, Ms. Filipertis detected a false pattern match and the “pattern” happened to be one that had a great deal of emotional significance to her. That reinforced her impression that the pattern was in fact real, again through perfectly non-pathological psychological processes; the whole reason why we have the scientific method is that we have to make a conscious effort to override those biases, attribution errors and heuristics in order to avoid jumping to conclusions. She then shared her interpretation of her observation with others for whom the “pattern” is also strongly emotionally significant, and a combination of social pressures and cognitive biases gave them a predisposition to try to find the pattern as well.

Wow. Normally I can see the things when they’re pointed out – though I don’t always get the same ID. I could see a movie star in the grilled cheese sandwich, and I could see Ernest Hemingway in the asparagus root … This time I can see the dog. I can see the guinea pig – well, something small and furry. I can even see the colonial gentleman – and that’s an odd thing to see, for sure, but it’s clear.

I see nothing that might be the BVM. This woman is definitely reaching.

Quoth Stuart Coleman: “I don’t see anything at all except a tree. But then again, I have always been bad at seeing design where there isn’t any.”

See, you’d be a fun guy to send to a psychiatrist who liked to use Rorschach tests. “What does this look like to you?” “It, um, looks like a blob of ink on a card.” “No, I mean, what do you see in the blob?” “You’re a very strange man. Have you considered seeking professional help?”

We lock up schizophrenics, don’t we? I completely fail to see the difference here.

ebohlman: I’m well aware of what pareidolia is and how it works. This goes beyond. Most cases at least provide a vague suggestion of a pattern, so I can see how the brain would build an image out of it. This, on the other hand, may as well be snow on a TV screen.

Crafty witch, we have a pareidolia match. I see a white cat, body facing the viewer, but with her head turned to the right, as she is licking her fur, so we see the back of the head. And how do I know she’s female? I allow a tiny bit of imagination into my otherwise factual observations.